


No Body, No Crime

by halcyon_autumn



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Azure Moon Route, Crime cover-up, F/M, Murder, Post-Game, Sorry to spoil but there's a murder, good news - it's not violent!, mild PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-27 22:48:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30130056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcyon_autumn/pseuds/halcyon_autumn
Summary: Written for theSylvgrid Evermore ProjectInspired by the song No Body, No Crime from Taylor Swift's 9th album Evermore.Things go catastrophically wrong during a Fhirdiad Ball, and Sylvain and Ingrid must scramble to cover things up. Will their actions bring them together, or will the secrets they carry tear them apart?
Relationships: Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30
Collections: Sylvgrid Evermore Project





	No Body, No Crime

_And in the hour of their death, the dead will be remembered. The Goddess will receive their soul, and the fire will receive their body. To do otherwise - to abandon the body, which was created from the Goddess’ blessed earth - is sacrilege._

_To do worse - to_ desecrate _the body - is a crime that cannot be spoken. May no human ever see it come to pass. But the Goddess sees. The Goddess remembers. And The Goddess will bring vengeance upon their heads._

The Sermons of Saint Seiros

Fancy parties in Fhirdiad never felt _right._ Everyone dressed perfectly. The ballroom glittered with hundreds of jewels, like the multi-faceted eyes of some ever watching insect. Sylvain moved through those eyes like he was one of them - he was one of them, for all that it made his skin twitch to admit that he was a political animal now. After years of philandering and then fighting, he’d settled into peacetime. Now he was one of Dimitri’s right hand men, a staunch supporter of the King’s progressive policies, and an expert at swaying people to his side of the political aisle.

Sometimes he didn’t mind. He could charm and cajole far better than Dimitri or Felix or even Byleth. His efforts to support an independent Duscur were starting to pay off, and it was a thrill to be useful for something besides his crest. Dimitri had tried to convince the court of the righteousness of granting sovereignty to Duscur. Sylvain had simply spoken to the enemies of the current ruler of Duscur’s lands, Count Kleiman. Once he pointed out that an independent Duscur would screw over Kleiman, support for Dimitri’s plans swelled.

But there were times he _did_ mind. One of those times was now, because Ingrid stood across the room, smiling and laughing while speaking to Gareth Ceredigion. House Ceredigion had gained prominence after the war, stepping into the vacuum left by the declining House Rowe. Gareth was likely to inherit from his childless uncle, and he could provide invaluable political and financial support to Dimitri. All of that mattered immensely to a political operative like Sylvain. It had to. Which meant that for the good of Faerghus, Sylvain had to ignore the harsh hot jealousy he felt when Ceredigion laid a hand on Ingrid’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear.

The entire court was buzzing that the two would be engaged soon. Sylvain didn’t know if it was true, because he couldn’t bear to ask. Ingrid hadn’t offered. There was a world where Sylvain was honest with Ingrid about his feelings for her, but it sure wasn’t this one. So instead he watched Ingrid watch Ceredigion walk out of the ballroom. Maybe he’d spend the rest of his life watching them be happy from a distance.

It was the middle of a party, so he couldn’t afford to think about it. Instead he sipped his wine and started to circle the room. There had to be something to distract him - ah. Felix stood in a corner, emanating anger the way the lava fields of Ailell emanated heat. Bothering him would make Sylvain feel better.

“Felix,” he said, voice honey smooth in the way that he knew Felix hated the most. He slung his arm over his friend’s shoulder. “Are you enjoying the party?”

“No,” Felix said, with the intensity of someone about to swear a blood oath. “Of course I’m not. I never am. What are you doing over here?”

“Felix, my closest friend, my war-time ally, my - “

“Stop,” said Felix stiffly. “I hate it when you get like this. Just because some girl turned you down doesn’t mean you can come over here and be an ass. 

“I haven’t been turned down,” Sylvain said, smug bravado rising to the surface just as he needed it. “Really, I haven’t.”

Felix shoved his arm off. “Whenever you feel rejected, you go to me, or Mercedes, or Annette. You flirt or act like a sleaze and generally annoy the shit out of whoever you’re talking to until _you_ feel better. It’s annoying. Stop.”

Was he _that_ transparent? 

“Well, if my presence isn’t wanted, I can leave,” he said, but his voice didn’t come out as light as he wanted it to me. Felix simply scowled and walked away, leaving Sylvain adrift. 

The ballroom felt more like a living thing then, garnet and sapphire eyes flashing, silks glittering like iridescent carapaces. Ingrid had left the ballroom while he wasn’t watching and he suddenly felt alone, exposed like a prey animal. So he did what he always did - forced a smile onto his face and walked calmly. He had to get out of here, but he didn’t want to look like a prey animal fleeing for the cover of the forest.

The air was cooler outside of the ballroom. He wished he could lose himself in these stone corridors, but the hallways were full of portraits of dead Blaiddyds scowling down at him and tapestries of gory battles. The castle hadn’t been designed to be a smoothing environment. So instead he just leaned against one of the gray stone walls and let himself feel very, very bad for himself.

He stewed in self-pity for at least fifteen minutes before he heard footsteps coming, fast and frantic. He stood to leave - the last thing he wanted was another person to perform for - but Ingrid turned the corner.

“Sylvain,” she gasped. Her hands went to his sleeve. “Sylvain, please.”

His heart lurched. “What’s wrong?”

“I need your help,” she whispered.

He couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked for him help. He did remember plenty of times that he’d sidled up to her, desperate for her help with whatever scrape he’d gotten himself into. No doubt that was why she didn’t want him - no. Something was _very_ wrong. He needed to focus on the present.

“Of course,” he said out loud. “Whatever you need, Ing.”

Something in Ingrid shifted. Her spine straightened and her eyes went as hard as the frozen Faerghus ground in winter. “Lord Ceredigion is dead.”

“Saints,” he gasped, horrified. _Dead?_ _How?_ _Are we under attack?_ “What happened?”

Ingrid hesitated. “He - he got stabbed.”

“ _He got stabbed?_ Who stabbed him?”

She raised her chin.

“Me.”

***

It had not been an accident.

Ingrid had thrust her dagger between Lord Ceredigion’s third and fourth ribs with perfect precision. She didn’t regret it as the knife entered, and she didn’t regret it as Ceredigion’s eyes went wide. She _did_ regret it, just a bit, when his body fell back against the balcony with enough force that he tipped over the edge and crashed into the walkway twenty feet below.

Logistically, it maybe would have been a better idea to stab him somewhere where his body _wouldn’t_ fall out of reach. 

“He’s on the walkway,” Ingrid told Sylvain. His mouth had dropped open, and she couldn’t bear the way his eyes went wide. They’d both killed plenty on the battlefield, but shoving a knife into someone during a ball was different. They both knew it.

“Did Dimitri tell you to kill him?” Sylvain asked. 

“No,” she said. She’d killed plenty on the crown’s orders both before and after the war. This wasn’t the same. “It was. . . it was spur of the moment.”

“Oh,” Sylvain said. The way his shoulders relaxed made her own shoulders tense. “It was self-defense then.”

She bit her lip. “No, it wasn’t.”

Sylvain stopped - stopped breathing, stopped blinking, stopped doing anything at all. It had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t help her, but a new and terrible fear squeezed her tight. _Ask me why I did it,_ she thought to him, and hoped that he wouldn’t.Would he think she’d had a good enough reason? Would he spend the rest of her life thinking that she was a -

“Ingrid, what do you need me to do?” 

“I need to move the body,” she said. Her posture straightened and her body adjusted itself to the weight of a lance she hadn’t carried since the war. It was easier to pretend to be a Captain again. “It’s very visible. I’m still deciding what to do with it.”

His eyes went a little unfocused in thought. “Maybe we could dump him in a river or lake?”

Ingrid shook her head. “That’s desecration of a body. We have to bury him.”

She expected Sylvain to look at her with judgement or mockery. Instead the look he gave her was fond, as if being worried about religious taboos about disrespecting a body was _exactly_ what he’d expected from her. 

“Ingrid,” he said gently, _so_ gently, “A freshly dug grave is noticeable. We need to dump the body somewhere that no one can find it. If no one discovers a body, then no one will be certain that there was a crime.”

The Daphnel family was passably religious, which meant they attended the long, droning sermons in the Church of Seiros, publically prayed to Sothis for a good harvest, and, when the harvest didn’t come, kept their complaints private. But she was shaken, and it made her susceptible to all the teachings of her childhood. A thousand years of belief crashed into her, drowning her in the belief that disrespect to a corpse was a heinous sin. Seiros herself had declared it, sword in hand, as she freed the world from Nemesis’ terror. It was a hard thing to shake.

“You’re right,” she said. Logically, dumping a body somewhere wasn’t any worse than murdering someone. But she wasn’t sure she could have stood against all those centuries of tradition with Sylvain by her side. “First we have to get down there.”

Sylvain grinned, something sharp but still sincere. “I have an idea.”

Five minutes later Ingrid was arguing with Sylvain and the world almost felt right again. “This tapestry is two hundred years old,” she hissed. “It depicts one of the most important battles between Faerghus and Sreng. We’re going to ruin it.”

Sylvain finished pulling the knot tight.The tapestry hung down the ramparts to the walkway below. “First of all, something being old doesn’t make it good. Second, Dimitri hates this tapestry. Third, we don’t have another choice.”

He was right on all three counts. Ingrid peered over the side of the wall, so the body on the walkway. The longer they waited, the more likely someone would come along. If they tried to get to the walkway by going through the castle, there would be far too many people who would remember seeing them pass by. 

“Fine. Let’s go.”

Ingrid went first. The tapestry strained under her weight, and every moment she expected it to rip and send her plummeting down to join Ceredigion. She braced her feet against the wall, felt the tapestry go taut, and tightened her stomach as she slid over the edge.

Rappelling down a tapestry was terrible The wool tugged at her fingers, leaving tiny friction burns on her hands. All her muscles strained. Her feet kept almost slipping. She could feel sweat beading on her forehead, gathering up before dropping below. It was a relief to reach the bottom right up until she realized that she would have to watch Sylvain make the same treacherous climb.

It was agonizing. He was so much taller than her, and everytime his feet slipped her heart lodged into her throat. He was doing this for her. If something happened to him now, it would be her fault.

The moment his feet hit the ground she nearly hugged him. “That was terrifying,” she whispered, feeling as if she was admitting to something much bigger.

“Ingrid, you fly around on a pegasus.” Sylvain’s voice was still a little strained, his breathing elevated from exertion. “Surely that’s not the scariest thing you’ve ever done.”

“I meant watching you.”

Sylvain stared at her. She briefly considered hauling herself back up the tapestry so she could fling herself off the wall and not have to deal with the fallout of saying _that_ out loud. 

Instead she cleared her throat. “Anyway, we should deal with…. _him_.”

***

Ceredigion’s body had looked better. Sylvain, in the meanest corner of his mind, thought that he still preferred this look to the easy grin he’d worn while talking to Ingrid. Guilt immediately shot through his chest. The man was _dead._

Ingrid was looking at the body too Sylvain watched her face shift from stony to emotionless. He wondered if she even knew she’d picked up that flat, unreadable expression from Glenn when they were all children. Glenn had only worn it when he was trying to hide bad news from his much younger friends.

He should just _ask_ what had happened _,_ right? Surely Ingrid had a good reason for stabbing someone. 

Although if she had a good reason, why hadn’t she just told him? Asking felt more and more impossible, until the idea of doing it made Sylvain’s chest constrict. Instead he scratched his head in an elaborate show of nonchalance. “We’ve got to figure out what to do with this thing now, huh?”

Ingrid was frowning up at the tapestry rather than dealing with the corpse she had made. “We can’t just leave this here.”

Sylvain looked from the body, to the tapestry, to the body again. “Let’s carry it back up, wrap it back in the tapestry and put it….somewhere.”

Ingrid hissed out a breath. “What do we do with the tapestry?”

“Leave that to me,” he said, partially because he didn’t have an answer and partially because he suspected Ingrid was trying to solve less important problems in lieu of dealing with the corpse at their feet. “Ingy, just pick up his feet. We need to move him.”

Her old childhood nickname hit her like a whip. He saw her flinch and flinched himself. He’d meant it to be comforting. But she nodded and he decided to count it as a win even though Ingrid was clenching her jaw so hard he wondered if it would snap off.

Climbing back up with a corpse over his shoulder was a unique kind of horrible. He’d carried bodies before. Sometimes, during the war, he’d carried an ally back to the healing tents only to find that he was too late and he’d been carrying a dead man the whole time. He told himself firmly that this wasn’t as bad as he hauled himself up higher. But he’d never carried a body up a tapestry that seemed less and less secure while supporting the weight of two grown men. He’d never climbed while trying to keep his grunts quiet. And he’d never carried a corpse while listening for any sounds, knowing that if someone discovered them, he and Ingrid were - 

He couldn’t think about it.

But thank the Goddess, the only thing he heard was Ingrid below, mopping up blood with Ceredigion’s coat. There was less than he’d thought. Bodies had always seemed much bloodier on the battlefield. He wondered why that was.

And then, despite the climb and the pain in his arms (was the corpse getting _heavier?)_ he was up and over the battlements again, trying to catch his breath and watching Ingrid climb after him. He let himself fall into the familiar focuses of the warfront. Keep watch, stay alert, listen for any strange noises - stray footsteps, low voices, fabric tearing - 

_Oh shit._

Sylvain dove to the battlements, just fast enough to catch the torn tapestry with his finger tips. Five feet out of his reach, Ingrid looked up at him with wide eyes. He thought of her falling back down below, plummeting out of his reach, and nearly gasped out the horror, knife-sharp, that shot down his spine.

“I’ve got you,” he gasped.

Ingrid didn’t speak, and for a wild moment he thought she’d been injured. But no, he knew that expression; he was just used to seeing it on an Ingrid who was two years younger, her wide eyes and thin line of a mouth the only clue that she could either be silent or start screaming, and she’d picked the first.

He’d never complain about being a political animal again. It was so, so much better than all his buried wartime instincts clawing their way into his present.

He hauled her up. Ingrid clamored over the battlements and into his arms, wrapping her whole body around his. He thought _we haven’t been this close since the war_ and _why did we ever stop_ and also _why does it take hiding a body for her to touch me like this again?_

Out loud, he said, “you alright?”

“Yeah,” she whispered. “Thanks.”

Sylvain swallowed. “Always. We should roll him up now.”

In the privacy of his mind he swore. He’d only wanted to think of the corpse as an _it_ , not a _he_. That felt important, though he was not about to examine his own emotions closely enough to figure out why. But Ingrid didn’t seem perturbed. She just nodded and began rolling up the corpse, brisk and businesslike. Maybe he should have been distrubed, but all he felt was admiration. She’d always been brutally efficient when she set her mind to something.

“Now what?” Ingrid asked when they were done. He could see her already starting to fray without a task to focus on. “We have to get him off the castle grounds.”

“No we don’t,” Sylvain said quietly. “Remember that little pond to the north of the castle?

“The body will float,” Ingrid whispered.

“No it won’t,” he whispered back. “We can weigh it down with rocks.”

Ingrid frowned. “We’re missing something. Someone will ask about the tapestry, or notice he’s gone, or -”

“All things considered, Ingrid, I think we’re doing a good job covering up a spur of the moment murder.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but Ingrid’s face went pale. “Is that how you see it?” She whispered.

Sylvain didn’t know. He was, with incredible deliberation, trying not to see Ceredigion’s death in any way at all. There was no telling exactly how he felt, so the safest thing was not to feel anything at all beyond the worry he needed to get them through this. 

“We can’t talk about it here,” he said.

It was the wrong thing to say, he knew it was, but there were about twenty-five wrong things to say - _no_ or _yes, but I don’t care_ or even _well we spent an entire war murdering people Ingrid, so I don’t know why we should start caring now._ All of them felt maybe true and maybe not, and he picked the least offensive thing and gasped it out like a dying man. He saw it hurt Ingrid. He saw her nod her head anyway and get to work.

If hell was real, Sylvain thought it would be carrying a body through a castle, every moment certain that someone would turn a corner and discover them. Once, they had to fling themselves into a small closet, everything pressed so close that he could hear Ingrid’s ragged breath as guards passed by a foot away. The only thing between them was a dead man.

The minute the footsteps faded they were moving again, fearful and hasty from their near miss. If they hadn’t known the castle so well, if they hadn’t spent their childhoods playing hide and seek, getting lost and getting found, they wouldn’t have made it. But they knew where the servants hid when they needed a break, knew where all the dusty rooms and forgotten doors were, and knew which windows were easy to unlatch.

“I hate this,” Ingrid muttered, squeezing her legs through one of the windows damaged in the fight against Cornelia. Sylvain knew that she kept bothering Dimitri to fix it in case of ‘security concerns’ because she’d complained to him about it at least three times. “I’m going to tear my dress.”

“Is that really the biggest concern?” Sylvain asked, shoving the body through the window after her. 

She grunted as she caught the other end. “It is if someone looks at me and wonders why I look like I’ve been crawling out of windows and hiding in closets.” 

This almost felt normal - the back and forth, Sylvain playing at not caring, Ingrid playing at sharp reproofs that they both knew weren’t needed. But Ingrid’s eyes kept sliding away from his. Speaking the word “murder” aloud had shattered something. Sylvain crawled out of the window anyway. Ingrid getting away with this was more important than anything else.

Even their friendship.

It was hard not to let the cover of night make him reckless. Now that they were out of the castle, nearly to their destination, anticipation kept spiking down his spine and out to his fingertips. He wanted to be free of this. He wanted _Ingrid_ to be free of this.

The pond was smaller than he remembered. It had seemed enormous when they were children, a veritable ocean, but now it was just an average sized body of water. It was deep, though. Dimitri had learned to swim there, and Sylvain remembered reading his letters about the pond so deep that even his father struggled to swim to the bottom.

“I’ll collect rocks,” Ingrid whispered. “Get him ready.”

 _Get him ready._ As if they were going to perform funeral rites before the burial, pray to the goddess and burn the sacred incense. As if there was something to lessen the blasphemy of what they were doing. As if they could avoid the mangled feelings and staggering secrets that they’d both be carrying after this.

Sylvain unrolled the tapestry and made himself look at Gareth Ceredigion’s face. This was what he could offer, carrying the memory of what he’d done for the rest of his life. He had a feeling it wouldn’t burden him the way it should. Oh well.

“I bet you deserved it,” he told Ceredigion, and kicked the tapestry back over his face.

Ingrid brought so many rocks that he could see her straining under the weight of them all. She dropped them beside him, carefully uncovered the body, and then started shoving the rocks into spare pockets. Sylvain knelt down to help. He wondered if he was getting dirt stains on his trousers. He wondered if the glittering eyes of the court would notice.

“Are you going to ask me?” Ingrid’s voice was barely louder than the wind dragging itself through the trees. “Are you going to ask me why I did it?”

Sylvain looked at her. “Do you want me to?” _I don’t know how to navigate this. Tell me what you want so I can do it and make everything okay._

“I don’t know.” Ingrid’s hands clenched into the weave of the tapestry, tight enough to tear it again. “Do you hate me for dragging you into this?”

“Of course not.” Sylvain reached out, rested his hand on Ingrid’s shoulder. “Ingrid, how many scrapes have you pulled me out of? And now I get to return the favor.”

Ingrid actually snorted. “This is a little bit _different.”_ She glanced down at the lake. “Do you think I’m a bad person? For kill- for murdering him. Please just tell me the truth.” Her voice shook. “I have to know.”

He loved her. He knew it suddenly, sharply, because nothing except love would convince him to dig through the maelstrom of whatever he was feeling to give her an honest answer. It would haunt Ingrid her whole life, color every interaction they had, if she didn’t know how he really felt or if she thought he was lying. 

So instead of answering, he closed his eyes and relived the night in his mind. Ingrid’s face rose before him and Ingrid’s voice saying “me” echoed in his ears. Ingrid’s face again as she looked down at Ceredigion, her eyes sad, her mouth a sharp red line in the dangerous pale of her face. It was all he could think about.

“I don’t care,” he admitted. “ I don’t care why you killed him. And I should, I know that I should, but I don’t because it’s _you.”_

The truth was horrible, so horrible that it should have been unspeakable, but Sylvain found that he could not stop speaking it. “You’re worried that you’re a bad person but I am one, already, There’s no reason you could give that would have made me do a single thing differently tonight.”

Ingrid’s hands were suddenly wrapped around his shoulder, Ingrid’s face suddenly pressed against his chest, and Sylvain wrapped himself around her in return. He could feel her breathing, chest hitching like he was crying, but when he looked at her face there were no tears.

“Do you hate me?” he whispered, and her own question tasted sharp and bitter in his mouth.

“No,” she said, and reached a hand out to gently cup his face. “I think we’ve both learned things about ourselves tonight. Maybe things that we didn’t want to know. But I - nothing you’ve said changes how I feel about you.” The silence felt...not companionable exactly, but flexible. Breakable. The sort of quiet a person could speak the truth into.

“I mentioned the troop movements in the South to him,” Ingrid said. “And he didn’t look surprised, even though it’s not widely known. So I said they were going to Charon even though they aren’t. And he corrected me and said they were going to Arianrhood.” Her next breath shuddered so hard that he could feel her whole body shake against him. “There’s no way for him to know that. Dimitri only sent the orders out today, and it’s supposed to be a secret.”

 _Present tense,_ Sylvain noted. Ingrid still didn’t quite believe he was dead, did she? And then he thought _oh shit. He’s a spy._

“I told him that I was taking him to the dungeon.” Of course Ingrid had charged the problem head on. “He struggled. I pulled out a knife. I could have subdued him but-”

“Ingrid, that’s self defense.” Sylvain pulled away so that he could look her in the eye. “He was a threat to you.”

Ingrid shook her head. “He didn’t have a weapon.”

“He could have shoved you off the battlements.”

“Maybe.” Her hands tightened. “But I think I could have taken him if I’d just had a moment to get myself under control. But I was so angry, and the only thing I could think to do was stab him.”

“So, your instincts took over because an enemy of the crown was struggling, and you felt like you were in danger. Just because you’re angry doesn’t mean that you murdered him.”

“Maybe,” Ingrid said again. 

He couldn’t tell why she was refusing to concede the point until a terrible possibility occurred to him. His voice came out in a gasp. 

“You loved him?”

Ingrid shook her head. “I liked him. And I thought that was as good as it would ever get for me - someone that I liked and could tolerate. I stabbed him and then I kept thinking about this stupid comb that he gave me for my birthday. I don’t - I don’t know if it was self-defense. It just felt all wrong in the moment, and all I could think was that I’d done something terrible.”

“You didn’t,” Sylvain said firmly.

Ingrid smiled, tired and a little sad. “You’re biased. You don’t know either.”

He hated that she was right. The truth of exactly what she’d done and felt was obscured by her own emotions and instincts as well as his; she may never be able to sort out what other options she’d had, if she’d done the right thing, if Ceredigion could have been subdued and brought to justice or if, as it had been during the war, Ingrid’s only option was the blade in her hand.

He thought of the glittering eyes of the court turning on Ingrid, using a split second decision to declare her guilty or innocent. Ceredigion’s family was politically powerful; they’d try to ruin her to save their own reputations. Even if Dimitri cleared her, and he almost certainly would, it would follow Ingrid for the rest of her life. 

Or it would have followed her, if she’d run to Dimitri instead of him. He wondered if it was pure luck or if deep down she’d known what he would do.

“You’re right that I’m biased,” he said. “But I still think you did the right thing.”

“I hope so,” she said back. She squeezed his hand and looked up at him, the moon reflected in her eyes, and he thought that she looked a little more at ease. It was enough.

They watched the body sink together, hand in hand.

***

It took a little over a day for someone to realize that Gareth Ceredigion was missing. There was no body, so at first the Court hoped that there had been no crime. His almost-fiance seemed distressed to speak of it. Even a Knight who’d served in the war would be shaken by the disappearance of a man she’d expected to marry.

(Perhaps, some whispered, she was the reason for his disappearance. Slighting Ingrid Galatea, war hero and ally of the King, was a political nightmare. If he’d wanted to break things off, simply disappearing until things died down was easier). 

Gareth Ceredigion stayed missing. The seasons changed, and the glittering eyes of the court moved on to the next scandalous story. A small pond north of the castle froze over in the winter, thawed in the spring, and stayed calm and picturesque as ever. If the fish were a bit fatter than usual, no one noticed.

And two years later, Ingrid Galatea and Sylvain Gautier stood, hands clasped together, smiling wide as they promised to spend the rest of their lives together. Faerghus vows were traditional, adapted from the oaths sworn between the first warriors to claim Faerghus for their own. It was a very traditional wedding except for the tiny alteration to their vows. Rather than promising to be a blade in each other’s hand and a shield at their back, the two paused. Ingrid’s smile was hard to read, but Sylvain’s was fiercely pleased as they spoke their vows for each other and the Goddess to hear.

_“And I swear, with my life’s blood, to carry the burdens that you bring to me, to help you carry your own, and to speak truth and love you just the same.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Big thank you to Nicole and Ash, who cheered me on and did not throttle me when I started my fic over like four days before the due date. Ash was also a wonderful beta, whose help was invaluable. 
> 
> Feel free to [follow me on twitter](https://twitter.com/halcyon_autumn) for more fire emblem thoughts and fic updates.


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